Tensions were running high last week. Insults shot back and forth during the final TV debates. “Are you done lying yet?” one of the politicians said impatiently, “Then it’s my turn now.” Cue much delight on Twitter.

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975.

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For many in Spain, the growing appeal of these populists is alarming. It certainly is for the conservative Popular Party (PP), which was humiliated in the ballot as its number of seats more than halved from 137 in 2016’s vote to 66. It’s a threat too, to the other main party on the Right, Ciudadanos, which entered the Spanish parliament in 2015 with around 14% of the vote. Though it remained steady at 16% yesterday.

But those most alarmed are on the Left, particularly the centre-Left Socialist Party (the PSOE), whose leader, Pedro Sánchez, has been Prime Minister since last summer, and Podemos, the young party to the Left of the Socialists. For them, Vox represents social and political regression in its purest form and will doubtless give them a turbulent time as they try to form a coalition from a fragmented system.

Vox was founded in late 2013 by Santiago Abascal, a former official of the Popular Party and Vox’s current leader. He left the PP because he felt it was abandoning its conservative values and getting too soft on Catalan and Basque secessionism. He now refers to his former party as “the tiny, cowardly Right”.

It didn’t break through until December of last year at which point it won more than 10% of the vote in the regional elections in Andalusia — a region especially affected by unemployment, immigration, and economic stagnation – helping to oust the Left, which had governed since 1982. Its appeal has subsequently been spreading across the country, with Abascal’s rallies drawing large crowds.

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Socially extremely conservative, Vox has been carefully tapping in to voter anxieties which are fuelled by culture wars and an acute sense of loss: the loss of a former way of life, of national sovereignty, of their privilege as well as the loss of jobs. Immigration is partly blamed for this. With some 50,000 people crossing the Mediterranean in 2018, Spain has now replaced Italy as the main hub for migrants from Africa. But the Catalan and Basque attempts at secessionism are also seen as agents of unwanted change and a betrayal of Spain.

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape.

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While the Left accepts the fact that the Spanish state contains various nations, including Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country — a political reality enshrined in Spain’s constitution — Vox calls for a return to centralism. Along with Ciudadanos and the PP, Vox is radically opposed to Catalan claims to self-determination. In fact, it proposes to make pro-independence parties illegal.

It’s partly in reaction to the Catalan bid for independence that Vox has managed to revive patriotism so powerfully. In post-Franco Spain, flag-waving jingoism was long considered in bad taste outside of any context that did not involve the national football squad. But Vox has embraced a full-throated Spanish nationalism, promoting the flag waving and everything else it entails.

It celebrates myths and heroes that could have been lifted directly from Francoist textbooks: the conquest of the Americas, the Catholic “reconquest” of Spain in the 1492 after centuries of Muslim “domination” and El Cid. There are other echoes from more recent history, too. Several prominent Vox candidates have been shown to have an extreme-right past. The party’s number two for Barcelona, for example, is a former candidate for Fuerza Nueva, a violent neofascist group.

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And  is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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Vox’s successful rise, and its leaching of voters from the other two parties on the right, unleashed a savage competition between Ciudadanos and the PP – pushing both to the Right. It was a battle, though, that the PP lost.

It falls, then, to the Socialists and Mr Sánchez – who won, but without a majority – to attempt to form a centre-Left coalition with Podemos, possibly with the support of the Catalan and Basque parties. This option, though, isn’t particularly favoured by the financial sector, which is nervous about Podemos’s proposals, which include raising the minimum wage, investing in health care and education, instituting a financial transaction tax, and cracking down on corporate tax evasion. And the separatists are seen as toxic by the centre Right, which will make it difficult for Sánchez to appeal to them for support.

Spain needs a stable government to tackle its many challenges: the economy has been growing at a bit over 2% but unemployment rates in some regions remains over 20%. The educational, judicial, and pension systems need overhauling, and it is desperate for a negotiated solution to the constitutional conundrum of its territorial make-up, which has paralysed the country for several years now.

It’s unlikely any coalition will bring stability; Spain isn’t used to them. And to make things worse, the entire country is going back to the polls on May 26 for regional, municipal, and European elections. This will make it harder for parties to commit to the concessions that coalitions require. Expect further division and disruption, now that the people have spoken.

“We stand here tonight … among the rubble of what was once the grandest and most beautiful civilization the world has ever known.”

On 20 March, an exhilarated Thierry Baudet, the 36-year-old leader of the Dutch Forum for Democracy (FvD), addressed an ecstatic crowd with a message of decline and a promise of resurrection.

“We are being destroyed by those who should be protecting us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists. By the people whose art is subsidized by the state and those who design our buildings. And especially by those who govern us […], people who haven’t read a book in their lives, have no idea what the long-term issues are, [and who] time and time again, in a strange mix of incompetence and cynical self-interest, make the wrong choices. But not for long!”

The populist rhetoric is now familiar in the Netherlands. It was the size of Baudet’s win that was the surprise. The FvD party, with its anti-immigrant, anti-EU and anti-liberal far-Right agenda, won some 17% of the votes in the provincial elections, more than any other party – something that is all the more remarkable given it has only been in existence for two years.

It is interesting too, in what it says about how the populist message is shifting.

Over the past 17 years, the political landscape in the Netherlands has become volatile and fragmented. The seeds of change were planted in the late 1990s by politicians such as Frits Bolkestein, of the Right-liberal VVD, who was among the first to question the country’s long-standing multicultural approach to immigration.

Then Pim Fortuyn, in the early 2000s, managed to associate a blanket rejection of non-Western immigrants, particularly Muslims, with the defense of progressive values like tolerance, gender equality, free speech, and gay rights — values, moreover, that he redefined in nationalist terms as quintessentially Dutch. Fortuyn was the founding father of a homegrown, Dutch brand of xenophobic populism that now represents more than a fifth of political opinion.

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He was murdered, in 2002, shot by a Dutch environmental activist who declared him to be a “threat to Dutch society’. Then, two years later, in November 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh — professional provocateur and a ruthless critic of Islam, too — was killed in broad daylight in Amsterdam by a 26-year-old Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent. The murders solidified the notion — among the public and a segment of the intelligentsia — that the country’s immigration policies had failed and that the presence of “unintegrated” foreigners was a problem that called for a drastic solution.

Enter Geert Wilders’s far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) with its folksy, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim style of populism. At the last Dutch parliamentary elections, in 2017, Wilders’s party achieved an unprecedented 13 percent of the vote, good for 20 seats and becoming the second-largest party after Rutte’s liberal VVD. At those same elections, Baudet’s party, barely six months old, won a surprising two seats.

Two years on, the FvD’s growth has come partly at the expense of Wilders’s PVV. But transfer votes from Wilders alone don’t account for Baudet’s meteoric rise. So where is the new support coming from?

Wilders and Baudet do share some central positions. Both, for example, have called for a radical stop to immigration from non-Western cultures. Both believe that Islam is incompatible with Dutch values and traditions. Both decry the domination of Dutch institutions by Leftist elites. And both seek to tap into a widespread anxiety among some sectors of the Dutch population that their culture is under serious threat.

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But in his personal style and cultural background, Baudet is Wilders’s polar opposite.

Wilders was born in 1963 in the southern province of Limburg and raised a Roman Catholic; his mother is of Indonesian descent. A career politician in Rutte’s VVD, he broke with that party in 2006 to found the PVV, convinced that the VVD did not sufficiently acknowledge the threat of Islam and immigration.

Baudet’s biography could not be more different. Born into a non-religious middle-class family in Haarlem, half an hour from Amsterdam, he attended his hometown’s prestigious Gymnasium and went on to read history and law in Leiden. In 2012, he earned his PhD in Law with a thesis co-directed by Roger Scruton.

Baudet has cultivated a public image as a witty and charming provocateur. He proudly claims to hate modern art, contemporary classical music, and contemporary architecture. In his free time, he plays classical piano. He sleeps little and reads widely. He’s written several books, including a novel.

He is not your standard Right-wing populist. He calls himself a “romantic conservative”. In fact, his worldview is deeply elitist, with elements reminiscent of José Ortega y Gasset’s reactionary 1929 classic The Revolt of the Masses.

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The problem, in Baudet’s eyes, is not that there is an elite. The problem is that the current elite is ignorant, incompetent, immoral, and weak. It needs to be replaced. Baudet’s view of the world is decidedly Darwinian: we should trust our instincts. Life is a struggle. Strength is what counts. Those who are not ready to fight are bound to be conquered. It’s the West against the rest.

Baudet likes to use Scruton’s term oikophobia, the repudiation of one’s own cultural inheritance, to diagnose the pathology of the Netherlands’ political and cultural leadership. Suffering from “a spiritual disease,” he claims, the country’s elites have been wilfully weakening Dutch political sovereignty by selling out to a faceless, bureaucratic European Union.

At the same time, they have allowed Dutch national culture to be “homeopathically diluted” through the ever-increasing influx of non-integrated non-Western refugees and immigrants. They have undermined the country’s defense mechanisms by suffocating it under a blanket of leftist illusions, numbing bureaucracy, and political correctness.

To the Left, the statements sound worryingly close to fascism. What concerns the liberal-Right is the ease with which Baudet dismisses the foundations of liberal democracy — including parliamentary politics.

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But for much of the population, his words are a breath of fresh air in a political climate where neoliberal technocracy, closed-door coalition negotiations, a culture of compromise, and politicians’ embarrassing slip-ups have undermined people’s faith in their leaders. It’s a message that resonates with Wilders’s voter base: the disgruntled white urban working class and conservative rural voters. To them, Baudet appears to offer to a chance to take back control.

His sophisticated, provocative image as a dangerous dandy who is not afraid to say what he thinks is also broadening his appeal to more educated voters. In particular, the FvD is gathering an enthusiastic following among university students, especially men, who are tickled by the idea that they would make far better national leaders than the current political class.

Today’s leaders, according to Baudet:

“no longer believe in the Netherlands. […] Not in our language […] not in our arts, in our past. They no longer believe in our holidays, our heroes.”

Today’s heroes are Baudet and his army. If things had not gone so badly, he said:

“I would have never entered politics. But we have been called to the front because it’s necessary. Because our country needs us. […] Today, we have chosen to go to battle again. To dream, to hope, to fight again.”

Such fighting talk is a far cry from Wilders’s one-man-show, which seems to have run out of steam after 13 years of not achieving very much policy-wise.

Baudet, by contrast, has a very specific platform of ideas. These include replacing the current system of political appointments to public or semi-public management positions with an open application process, moving to direct mayoral elections, and bringing in binding referendums on important political issues. Some of these measures, including directly elected mayors, have been long demands of the liberal Left. The call for referendums, meanwhile, cleverly taps into widespread discontent with the way the Dutch government adopted a referendum law in 2015, only to abandon it after it saw itself forced to ignore the results of the consultations.

He is outspoken, too, on environmental policy. Baudet is opposed to any efforts to counteract climate change, which he sees as a “masochistic heresy fed by guilt”, “a secularised belief in the Deluge” that will “not only mean the total collapse of our economy but is also meant to further hurt our spirit and self-confidence”.

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This element of his platform, too, represents an electoral option that no other party has dared to offer. Although the Dutch economy has had a better recovery from the Great Recession than most other EU countries, the government’s climate policy has resulted in a significant increase of household energy bills.

So what happens next? If parliamentary elections were held today, polls suggest, the PVV and FvD would together win 22% of the vote, which in the Netherlands’ almost fully representational system would correspond to about 34 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber —an absolute record, and a far cry from the one or two seats that radical Right parties would win until 20 years ago.

Will the other Dutch parties be willing to govern with Baudet and his crew, given that his party is most likely to become the largest in the Senate chamber? Prime Minster Rutte has trouble enough as it is keeping his four-party, centre-Right coalition together.

Some propose a principled cordon sanitaire, refusing any gesture that could be seen as legitimating radical-Right positions. Others remember how attempts to form a parliamentary coalition with Wilders’ party several years ago were sabotaged by Wilders himself, when he refused to adhere to the Dutch political culture of compromise.

Baudet, however, has said he understands that entering a coalition will require concessions. Perhaps in anticipation of this next phase, he appears to have modified his position on the Netherlands’ relationship with the EU. For many years, he openly advocated for the country to leave. (“After #Brexit we should have #Nexit,” he tweeted in May 2016.)  Yet when, on 2 April, Wilders’ party proposed a parliamentary motion for Nexit, the FvD’s two deputies voted it down. The FvD continues to be sceptical about Europe but says that the voters, not the parliament, should make decision to stay or leave, through a referendum.

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Baudet is clearly determined to keep his momentum. “We are building a party with its own educational institute,” he said on 20 March. “We will educate a new generation to replace and defeat our current leaders. … So that we may finally rule our own country once again.”

But the volatility of Dutch electoral politics today makes for rapid rises and equally precipitous falls. Quick expansion carries risks — and so does assuming actual government responsibilities, whether it’s at the local, provincial, or national level.

Fortuyn’s party collapsed as quickly as it was born. Wilders’ PVV, unable to deliver, has passed its peak. Baudet, though, seems to have learned from the organisational failures of his populist predecessors. Still, the day-to-day of governing — if his party gets that far — will prove a crucial test.

But given the ascent of nationalist Right-wing movements elsewhere in the world and the Left’s relative impotence in the face of their rise, Baudet, even more than Fortuyn and Wilders, looks set to enjoy the advantage of a strong global tailwind.